The London Scene by Virginia Woolf

Author:Virginia Woolf [Virginia Woolf]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907970436
Publisher: Daunt Books
Published: 2013-01-27T00:00:00+00:00

IT IS a commonplace, but we cannot help repeating it, that St Paul’s dominates London. It swells like a great grey bubble from a distance; it looms over us, huge and menacing, as we approach. But suddenly St Paul’s vanishes. And behind St Paul’s, beneath St Paul’s, round St Paul’s when we cannot see St Paul’s, how London has shrunk! Once there were colleges and quadrangles and monasteries with fish ponds and cloisters; and sheep grazing on the greensward; and inns where great poets stretched their legs and talked at their ease. Now all this space has shrivelled. The fields are gone and the fish ponds and the cloisters; even men and women seem to have shrunk and become multitudinous and minute instead of single and substantial. Where Shakespeare and Jonson once fronted each other and had their talk out, a million Mr Smiths and Miss Browns scuttle and hurry, swing off omnibuses, dive into tubes. They seem too many, too minute, too like each other to have each a name, a character, a separate life of their own.

If we leave the street and step into a city church, the space that the dead enjoy compared with what the living now enjoy, is brought home to us. In the year 1737 a man called Howard died and was buried in St Mary-le-Bow. A whole wall is covered with the list of his virtues. ‘He was blessed with a sound and intelligent mind which shone forth conspicuously in the habitual exercise of great and godlike virtues…. In the midst of a profligate age he was inviolably attached to justice, sincerity and truth.’ He occupies space that might serve almost for an office and demand a rent of many hundreds a year. In our day a man of equal obscurity would be allotted one slice of white stone of the regulation size among a thousand others and his great and godlike virtues would have to go unrecorded. Again, in St Mary-le-Bow all posterity is asked to pause and rejoice that Mrs Mary Lloyd ‘closed an exemplary and spotless life’ without suffering and indeed without regaining consciousness, aged 79 years.

Pause, reflect, admire, take heed of your ways – so these ancient tablets are always advising and exhorting us. One leaves the church marvelling at the spacious days when unknown citizens could occupy so much room with their bones and confidently request so much attention for their virtues when we – behold how we jostle and skip and circumvent each other in the street, how sharply we cut corners, how nimbly we skip beneath motor cars. The mere process of keeping alive needs all our energy. We have no time, we were about to say, to think about life or death either, when suddenly we run against the enormous walls of St Paul’s. Here it is again, looming over us, mountainous, immense, greyer, colder, quieter than before. And directly we enter we undergo that pause and expansion and release from hurry and effort which it is in the power of St Paul’s, more than any other building in the world, to bestow.

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